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When you see 50 to 75 productions a year, it takes a special show to you leave you speechless. Steve Yockey's Octopus at Island City Stage is that show.
Not even 15 minutes pass, and the audience is already eavesdropping on an all-male, full-frontal foursome, the result of two couples who should probably be in therapy but instead decide to be in each other.
And yet the initial shock at seeing everything -- which makes a faux-risqué musical like The Full Monty look like a benign comedy for the ladies' luncheon set -- wears off as quickly as it arrives. That's because the uninhibited actors are comfortable with it themselves and because it's an unexpectedly beautiful scene, staged like an erotic ballet of rotating configurations, the eight arms of the men beginning to give you some idea of the title's symbolism.

Easily one of Island City Stage’s most ambitious undertakings, Steve Yockey’s Octopus, directed by Andy Rogow, contains adult themes and nudity. Oh, and there’s also that “ravenous sea monster from the ocean floor,” the leak and the pool of water on the set. Essentially the story of the potential dangers facing the relationship of a contemporary, young gay couple (played by Christopher Mitchell and Craig Moody) and how they deal with it, Octopus, is one of Yockey’s 15 full-length plays. I spoke with Yockey about Octopus, making its South Florida premiere through March 1 at Empire Stage

Steve Yockey may be a modern day version of Jean Paul Sartre. Sartre? What does that mean? Yockey’s play Octopus gets quite an imaginative and adventurous staging at Island City Stage — but there’s really no other way to approach Octopus. Yockey dishes out theater of the absurd — some of Sartre’s existentialist leanings have no doubt seeped into the playwright’s psyche.